31.12.2012

So I smoked and
I drank and I translated Homer’s Neukia episode into Nahuatl — Auh Onitemoc Acallpa … Pound’s
Homer through (Andreas) Divus into the language of the Yucatan, to give back a
blood transfusion while I was … What the hell did I care about Cortez? Or
even Fortun Ximenez, who was sent northward that he might discover the
land of the female Caliphate (California), replete of course with gold, and
thereupon conquer? Leaf split
lengthwise / in the Southern California air / drifting through a hangover /
“Fuck this place,” Fortun began … It began with a hundred ants among the
roots and moved through such world into the spheres, constellations, and higher
fields of life — the crystal and the ivy — presence and generation: my family
would soon make a natural entry, feathers and shells, fragments of bone and
bits of obsidian, picked up in tidal zones or the dirt of ruined cities. Time
for built environment genomics. Don't underestimate the people at CERN, they
see worlds fly by faster than anybody ... Specifically rendered, detail by
detail: “an unmarked bottle of pink pills and a pink diary with a gold lock. The
heavy curtains are drawn. The beige carpet is stained in various places and
covered in clothing and other items, such as a half-eaten Eggo waffle with
cinnamon and sugar on it. A dog bed: a basket with the dog’s name, Charlie, stamped
in Sentimental font.” Instead of the walls there were kinds of short spikes.
“How do you want to make it”. Besides that everything was okay. The bridge was
out and the tunnels were closed and the elevators felt like they would snap
from their legs and bodies and instead of gravity happening gravity would get
completely pissed off and give up and throw something at a wall and nothing would
come out of it. My third job was to quit my second job and the third job took
up too much fleshwork. The flesh is like a kind of “Help, but, oh well.” The barren mountain
stays on the barren mountain. Three pounds of ink stay in the intestines. Jadeite
water stays in the teapot. Spring stays inside the hat. The big valley is a
vast mother-of-pearl mirror. There walks the large dead swan. And there walk
the mother-of-pearl children. Or the fragile founding / foundling clumps. They
led the swan into a forest. Go now and eat that which you have taken from the
swans. Then one ran up and cut a branch from the tree and grabbed a burning branch
and stuck it into her throat. Until the swan’s flesh fell off in beautiful
heavy clumps. Qualifications? She had never been to any poetry reading. Though
we all know her work. She designed New York’s yellow cabs. Whip in hand, the
courtesan Phyllis rides on the back of the philosopher Aristotle, who crawls
naked on all fours. The illustration is based on a medieval legend. Aristotle
had tried to end Phyllis’ relationship with Alexander the Great. In revenge,
Phyllis inveigled the philosopher and, as proof of his love, demanded that she
be allowed to ride him like a horse. The legend came to be seen as an allegory
of woman’s domination of man — but isn’t there another, more subterranean
interpretation? The philosopher, of all people, should not put himself above
sex. To the contrary, he should put himself beneath it. Get off your ass,
thinker, lest it be whipped.

30.12.2012

Vanda
Vieira-Schmidt witnessed demonic operators with portable uranium devices on the
underground, torturing and even murdering passengers with electricity and
‘uranium hits’. Since her release, she has been drawing diagrams and magical
sigils on pieces of paper at a rate of up to a thousand a day. Now, whenever
any violence breaks out in the world, it can be controlled; indeed, we can use
her drawings to mediate in global conflicts. This work has helped to restore her
peace of mind, and, she feels, a broader ‘peace on earth’ – a goal that would
have been well understood by James Tilly Matthews, a passionate peace activist
whose confinement in Bedlam was the culmination of his reckless and tragic
attempts to prevent war between Britain and France. Those spores and the
phosphor-luminescence pulsate with an eerie light, which coincides and
collaborates with the light of the cinema screen, as it reaches our faces and
bathes us too in its greeny-bluey etherium. The old miner, a remnant from
German Romanticism, once upon a time descended into the cave to stay amongst
the glimmer, amongst the luminous stones that he says have voices. It is no
surprise that the super-robots of anime, such as Mazinger Z, fire photonic
beams from their eyes – you’re 25 years old and Sappho’s been dead for
centuries. Proper kids, we set fire to the cottage in the woods like
cartographers puking for hours in the dampness of the technical mist, the zone
of brooming up carcasses so their tongues could snarl from pikes. I mean, it’s
weird up there and there is nowhere in the world that can remind you of how
much money you don’t have like Fifth Avenue and the bushes outside the Plaza
Hotel are teeming with rats and the sidewalk outside Bergdorf Goodman reeks of
horse shit from the carriages in Central Park, and a very old man came up to us
and shouted “OH LOOK HERE I AM GETTING MY EMAIL FROM THE TOILET, HERE I AM WITH
MY EMAIL, YOU PEOPLE ARE SO BORING,” and then he tottered away. But wait! This
doesn’t mean that I massively despise myself. No, I like my printed work. I
live for that — for theory, really. And shamelessly. I hate this leftist
humanitarian attitude: People are
starving! Children in Africa! Who needs theory? No! We need useless
theory more than ever today, I claim. Open quotes but never close them. Genital
life gives way to bubbles, the broken off parts recombining in the milky, oily
darkness of the soft brain. Are you sick and tired of running away? I pull myself
up from my knees to clean. The pregnant guest was Japanese -- she told me about
the hot springs with monkeys and hot saki floating on trays. One day she took
me to hangar H. In a small room six files lay on a table. Someone determined to
prove something had gathered notes, quotes out of context, “conclusions,”
mostly relating to the circulation and accuracy of information — “generally
speaking,” she said — from the five books of stereohell. She left me alone, without a word. I started to examine
the files. The texts were short and fragmented. Everything was disarticulated.
One document stated that “communications” undergo distortions, and depicted the
mechanisms of such distortions as persistently evolving in capacity and speed,
but there was a stable principle inherent to them that wasn’t. The principle
was described in a separate file by a set of definitions and theorems supposed
to deter misconceptions but I understood that the clear comprehension of the
principle, how it structured its field of applicability and impinged askew on the
surface of all things “shared” (communicated), and how it produced distortions,
didn’t guarantee the full understanding and control of the distortions
themselves, which were undeviatable and unflappable and continued to exist
identical to themselves despite any comprehension thereof.

29.12.2012

Since then, it’s
been creeping up on us that the end
of the world’s already occurred. At least Kant knew when to panic. Take a
Book Leave a Book. But why ‘Young-Girl’? Who is she, and what kind of ‘theory’ is presented here? Tiqqun explain
that every postwar consumerist subject, every ‘model citizen’, every bearer of
power is the Young-Girl: ‘All the old figures of patriarchal authority, from
statesmen to bosses and cops, have become Young-Girlified, every last one of
them, even the Pope.’ And yet the book is precisely not called ‘Theory of the
Wizened-Pope’. The 23-year-old medical student whose savage gang-rape on a
moving bus in Delhi struck the very core of India died in a hospital in
Singapore today. O human shiitake airship, your homicide hat of oaky
euros is like a fang boot fuming ginkgo nagas in a sauna of chopped
poached cockroach dipped in caramel, a caramel nest doorframe may open onto the
mythical land of Chalaza, OK, it turns out that Bulgakov’s close friend N. N.
Lyamin lived at Savelevskii pereulok 12 with his wife Natalia Ushakova. The
nonexistent name “Pyazhnin” is clearly a distortion of Lyamin. But how and why
did the distortion creep in? You’re here on a couch, pillows fluffed, dreaming
in Latin. You’re in a tablet carved on a mountain and given to men whose ears
filled with ontology. The French Revolution began without you and ended the
same. In the bucolic pastures of Hazerswoude-Dorp, nestled in verdant fields of
ruminating Holsteins, lazy windmills, and pert tulips, lies a quaint Dutch farm
that functions as the world’s largest psilocybin-containing truffle factory. This
is an alphabetized list of the creatures inhabiting (thus far) the new poems
I’m writing. Just like in life, I am surprised by the number of fruit flies.
This originally started out as a blog about wine, yet I started drinking less
and less right after its inception, because who needs to lose further control
of her faculties during a summer with little to no light? Now, thanks to an
autoimmune conundrum, the most exciting drink I drink is apple cider vinegar
diluted in water, which is indeed a very exciting drink! One day, I will blog
again about wine’s emotional qualities; in the meantime, I am plugging away at
an essay — “Thirst: A Pseudo Philosophy,” an exploration of wine, desire,
philosophy, and sickness (also [sic]ness). Who will enter this beautiful
beautiful mask of / punctured bladders moving with a mask of chapsticks /
this top heavy beauty bathed with charcoal water? Make Ifa make Ifa make Ifa Ifa Ifa. Push Back the Catastrophes. Although
already mapping out From Caligari to
Hitler and Theory of
Film (the former rooted in his Weimar film criticism, the latter
conceived during his Parisian exile), Kracauer wrote some shrewd analyses of
contemporary American cinema. Published in Commentary in 1946, “Hollywood’s Terror Films: Do They Reflect
an American State of Mind?” is an excellent early take on what was yet to be
named “film noir.” Not surprisingly, Kracauer recognized the tendency as
essentially Germanic: “The weird, veiled insecurity of life under the Nazis is
transferred to the American scene. Sinister conspiracies incubate next door,
within the world considered normal — any trusted neighbor may turn into a
demon.” ‘Can this really be the Son of Plato?’ we are invited to ask. And
what of the son of Hegel? Not only does my smoke detector sound an alarm, it
announces in a calm female voice, “Fire, fire!”

28.12.2012

So many facts
turn indigo if you let them. I fly east. I fly north. I fly south. I fly west.
I fly east. We are going to go fishing as soon as our mental breakdowns are
over with. “If Point A is here [pressing a point on my arm] and Point B is
there [my leg], then we are time travelers, mom.” Have you ever noticed that Enigma almost anagrams Imagine? It is mere walking distance to
a large supermarket adorned with carnival flags waving above old men in bright
polyester parkas rolling vanilla-flavored cigars in the parking lot. Cool
Whip™, Kool-Aid™, Tang™, and ten-for-a-buck neon drinks do not look like
anything else because they aren’t. You know when you go to see a band and while they’re playing you kind of move
your head from side to side as if to say, “Okay, this is a pleasant little
ditty, this is cute” and you feel like you’re your dad doing the dishes with
some Doors song stuck in his head? “I have thought simultaneously: ‘I really
should learn the trombone’ and ‘there’s a dead ant.’” “My memory is structured
like a disco ball.” “Everything I write is true, but so what?” My fear of
clowns is well established. “I thought I read on one of the bottles in a
Chinese pharmacy ‘octopus wigs.’” Your urine shouldn’t smell like rotting ham.

27.12.2012

Nor have we seen
or fully described the spiritus silvestre
or “wild spirit” — the term used by Jan Babtist van Helmont when he first
described carbon dioxide gas — that rang out as scientists characterized
relationships between this gas, music as a muse and nothin’ 90s about a spiked
snapback and 6 inch square heels, but the ‘frustrated rebel youth look’ is timeless.
BILLY
GETS ME FOR SURE. I’m rocking a pair of UNIF Hellbound Platform Boots (limited edition on
Nasty Gal) -- very exclusive, much adored, and a perfect fit for my print-crazy
wardrobe. They look so cute next to my other two pairs. A little Hellbound
family. Thank you, Nasty Gal for offering me the opportunity to give the Las
Vegas concrete a piece of me with some sky-high stomp treatment. These
platforms pair well with my winter gear: ripped jeans from PacSun and a
two-piece denim jacket from Chicwish. Cuba, the only country
with 0% child malnutrition, according to UNICEF. An accordion and
dulcimer-playing singing-in-Klingon post-punk grrl band!!! “I am not interested
in preserving the beauties of the Arabic language.” Music is a lobster, an egg.
The Mine Kafon is a central core designed to fit an array of legs. It rolls
where the wind blows and triggers land mines, and tho it loses legs each time a
mine blows, it keeps rolling til it can’t, setting more mines off. And then it
melts into the sand. Please take a few minutes to read over these notices, then
Kickstarter them. Imagine a pear tree covered with golden fruit. The strong
force is carried by eight gluons. This is
Cat’s Home where the little mogs scratch against the door like Lovecraftian
intruders. On the sill a crumbly plaster statuette of Diana dances among her
deer, brass angel extends elongated arms to define his / her spaces amid the
cardboard boxes. I draped my clothes on a plinth. Lee says I can chair the
fan club. “It was my cunt, too — not the velvet one, of course, but the center
one with the hanged man attached to it. That same summer, my sister and I
turned detective and held the spy glass over the ants and discovered they were
busy planning hoaxes. Everything I do, I do because I know I am dying. My most
favorites of things are optical illusions. We don’t become senile or “lose our
minds,” it’s just that as we get older, we have more to think of in less time —
we must think of more in a compressed amount of time. I think I know now what
you’ve tried to teach me, that poetry is an instant, an instant in which
transcendence is achieved, where a miracle occurs and all of one’s knowledge,
experience, memories etc. are obliterated into awe. Is anything I say real? And
by real, I mean sincere — or is everything an attempt to have love? I know now
why the line breaks: it is because something dies, and elsewhere, is born again
…”

26.12.2012

« Puisque le
bonheur n’existe pas, tâchons d’être heureux sans lui. » It’s your party and I
don’t want to be thought of as high maintenance. I think we caught all the
scorpions who live in your throat. Utah town burns 16-foot mammoth effigy for
winter solstice. It smells like masking tape inside this suitcase and a fortune
cookie that reads, “love conquers all”. Jumping around and around the fields
like a drunk grasshopper, r u there yet? ‘my hrror’ the billboard reads; the
‘o’ has either fallen off or they were
too cheap to buy two o’s. Of course I too would love to beat the shit out of
someone. But unlike her I would only derive a sense of pleasure from it if the
person truly deserved it. And even then, I would probably feel guilty
afterward. When I told D I thought it would be cool to be a dominatrix he told
me he wanted me to whip him. I said, but
you’re too nice. I would feel bad. I only want to whip shitty people. This
is a deeply disturbing and darkly hilarious novel whose full meaning, its
author asserts, will be found not in the book’s pages but in the dreams people
will have after reading it. It depicts a postcataclysmic world in which the
forces of capitalism have begun to reestablish themselves. Sharply opposed to
such a trend, a group of crones confined to a nursing home — all of them
apparently immortal — resolves to create an avenging grandson fashioned of lint
and rags. And in a “greasy parlando”, which always inhabits a compromised social structure, a
tweezed eyebrow’s the fringe of a shanty-town along the manicured horizon, like
if yes subtends a sharp declension metered out to that best part where we
possess more brutal happiness or as we sleep sequestered wet reload within this
mortar lies R136a1 and a furnace of god-making, and yet we are only talking
about it; that, or something like it, “Oxytocin Nasty”, with milk and reward
where you have to Google most of it to get started, Pindaric Odes made of
serial nos, season cycles, chemicals, tableaux, waterways, the sound, the
joyous and aching sound: “to compare our / fahrenheits / our barrens and our /
heights our dusts and / driveways” with “slogans” we turn a corner and unexpectedly
come face to face with Content in its most up-close bristling troubling aspect
and Layout in its most directly eloquent mode, torqued – or should I say
“tocked”? – more tenuously “Lakes of the Rub’ al Khali” refers to the
poignantly ephemeral lakes of that desert, 5-10,000 years ago, once inhabited
by long-horned cattle and water buffalo. The American Bison is arguably the
most dangerous animal in the USA; it is curious to reflect that most wild stock
contains an admixture of genes from domestic cattle.

[Note: Sources:
Ernst Moerman, as quoted in Pierre Joris, “Puzzled Translator’s Merry Xmas
Wishes”, at Nomadics, 25 Dec 012
(“Translated it will say ‘Given that happiness doesn’t exist / let’s do our
best to be happy without it.’ The original works better because there are two
French words for happiness / happy: ‘bonheur’ as noun, and ‘heureux’ as
adjective. Even if an etymological link exists, the words are different enough
on the surface to suggest two unconnected concepts of happiness / being happy
while keeping that rhyming bi-vowel ‘eu’ going. I guess I could replace [the 2nd]
‘happy’ with what the dictionary gives as synonyms: cheerful, cheery, merry,
joyful, jovial, jolly, jocular, gleeful, carefree, untroubled, delighted,
smiling, beaming, grinning, in good spirits, in a good mood, lighthearted,
pleased, contented, content, satisfied, gratified, buoyant, radiant, sunny,
blithe, joyous, beatific; thrilled, elated, exhilarated, ecstatic, blissful,
euphoric, overjoyed, exultant, rapturous, in seventh heaven, on cloud nine,
walking on air, jumping for joy, jubilant; chirpy, over the moon, on top of the
world, tickled pink, on a high, as happy as a clam; jocund… “); Shane Allison, “A Birthday Poem for Nat”, at EOAGH, 24 Dec 012; Julia
Cohen, “I Think We Caught All The Scorpions Who Live In Your Throat Press”, at $650 Apartment for $650,
25 Dec 012;
Jacob Sloan, “Utah Town Burned 16-Foot Mammoth Effigy For Winter Solstice”, at Disinformation, 25 Dec
012; Ananta Prayitno, “rainy”, at Have U Seen My Whale #5; Jman Atienza, “Borrowed Space”, at Have U Seen My Whale #5; Michael O’Brien, “Terror & This World”, at Have U Seen My Whale #5; Jackie Wang, “once she boasted about beating
someone up with a chair and getting away with it …”, at Ballerinas Dance With
Machine Guns, 25 Dec 12; Amazon blurb for Antoine
Volodine, Minor Angels; Michael Peverett, “Better
Than Language (2011 Anthology)”, at Intercapillary Space, Sept
011 (all mashed up, incorporating bits from Anna Ticehurst, Joe Luna, Mike
Wallace-Hadrill, Sarah Kelley, Steve Willey, Timothy Thornton, and Tomas
Weber)]

25.12.2012

The Ghoul dances
with glee around your body, lays it next to the others on the ground, turns you
over and sinks its teeth into your rump. It is not often it gets fresh meat to
feed on. Your adventure is over. A small splotch of blue ink on a slice of
mushroom that’s been used as a rubber stamp. Let’s get lost. And the boys from
the NYPD choir were singing Galway Bay / And the bells were ringing out for
Christmas day. It’s hard not to disengage from reality when observing or
experiencing the revolution; through it we have lived all of our Hollywood
cinematic fantasies. The story-arcs we have experienced so far in this
theatrical saga include the following: inspirational peaceful revolution,
Romantic comedies, Family drama, generational conflict, human rights struggles,
Gang warfare, vigilante society, Courtroom drama, political thrillers, Media
Thrillers, Freedom of Speech battles, Tales of Corruption & deceit, Zombie
attacks, Religious persecution, election sagas, and now we are entering the
civil conflict & civil war section. All of this, in two years that also
included a man who wrestled with a lion, 4 churches that were attacked / burned
because a woman left her husband, and the brave tale of one man who, in retaliation
for their killing of an Egyptian soldier on the border, climbed a 10 story
building to capture an Israeli flag off of the embassy, a moment hailed by all
as a great victory, to the point of giving him a hashtag., gadji beri bimba
glandridi laula lonni cadori / gadjama gramma berida bimbala glandri galassassa
laulitalomini / gadji beri bin blassa glassala laula lonni cadorsu sassala
bim / gadjama tuffm i zimzalla binban gligla wowolimai bin beri ban /
o katalominai rhinozerossola hopsamen laulitalomini hoooo / gadjama
rhinozerossola hopsamen / bluku terullala blaulala loooo. It starts with
the real – or the almost real. The New York Stock Exchange is, primarily, a
place and a platform where people sell shares of companies to one another. The
stock market. ICE is a bit more complex, or one level more abstracted, in that
its principal business is to administrate the sales of derivatives. Derivatives, as the words
implies, are one or more levels of abstraction away from real stocks. Where a
share of stock represents some small percentage of ownership of a company, a
derivative – like a futures contract – is just a bet on the future price of the
stock. When you buy or sell a derivative, you are not investing in a company
but in the price movement of the shares. It’s one level abstracted. Of course,
you can also buy derivatives of derivatives – bets on the movement of
derivatives prices – or even derivatives of those. Exchanges like ICE also let
you bet on volatility or the changing rate of volatility. The amazing thing
here is that the derivatives market is now so much bigger than the “real”
market that elomen elomen lefitalominal / wolminuscaio / baumbala
bunga / acycam glastula feirofim flinsi / baubo sbugi ninga gloffa /
ombula / jolifanto bambla o falli bambla / tressli bessli nebogen leila /
flusch kata / ballubasch / zack hitti zopp. A point a particular
point a point a point evading its own point a point that reveals another point
the point that annihilates its shadow a point the point right on point: It was
something that was smaller than anything. It’s not made of anything — it is
everything around the thing that it is and everything inside of it at the same
time and it kind of moves about in a way that’s not on the grid. Early on I saw
that Earth was having a vibration. That it was like a constant breath, but we
can’t see it. You can’t see it from photos. The edge of everything. It got so
hot. It was like a wave that was like electricity. It was black and then red
and then white, and it was rounded and arched as if it were in orbit somewhere.
Your bodies were, like, singing — everything you were doing was like a song.
It’s hard to talk about it. I cried for some reason. I remember thinking there
was a message for me there. I could see patterns within the design patterns
that were supposed to be there, and they all moved and looked ill as shit.

24.12.2012

“Bindschädler,
at three, four, five one lives off the images, the thoughts one has inherited,
as a dowry for life. — At sixty-three, -four, -five one walks along a river of
a Saturday, declares it North American, feels its gray, orange, yellow tones as
Indian tones, hallucinates a canoe on it, with the last Mohican inside, crowned
with two, three colorful feathers. And one understands, glancing at the oaks by
the river, that the Germanic tribes revered oaks. And one looks back on the
decades of duties fulfilled as a citizen,” Baur stumbled, “that is, on decades
when one produced shoes for example, rifles, made bricks, tiles, bicycles,
cars, television sets, and so forth, or made oneself useful in some other way,
focusing on punctually observing the start of the workday, the end of the
workday, above all the start. And one remembers having tried to keep body and
limbs clean all those years, the dirtying oneself that comes from inside and
that comes from outside, from the street for example, from the lathe, from jam,
to get rid of it, also the dirt between the toes and other parts. And you think
of the Eau de Cologne you poured in your left hand to spread on your cheeks,
neck, nape, forehead. And you think of the Eau de Cologne you poured in your
right hand to spread on your cheeks, neck, nape, forehead. You see again the
clothes that you put on, all those years; you see particularly the pants, and
of these especially the legs, which couldn’t be too long or too wide …” A night
in which all cows are black still has cows. If I see one more arty photograph
of a supposedly anonymous ranch house I’ll scream. The whole feng shui flutters
around me. Hell, it’s time we listen to our hickish selves more clearly, most
clearly. Look into my eyes, amiga, and speak. Heaven is already here, if you
want it. Good Lawd, that cheap beer must be kickin’ in. A portly dude eases a
buck into the juke box, prods Los Tigres del Norte to sing, “Salierón de San
Isidro, procedentes de Tijuana.” This is a Korean-American owned bar, by the
way. Here, a plate of rice and bulgogi is only $3.99. She says, “I actually
have never read Ana Božičević, although I hear she is good. What do you
recommend by her? Also, still thinking about siluteas, have you ever seen this image by Francesca Woodman?
Her photographs are amazing. What about Capitalism and Schizophrenia? ‘An economy is a system of apparently
willing but actually involuntary exchanges. A family, for example, is really a
shop front, a glass plate open to the street.’” Anyone who can
pick up a frying pan owns death. Although I have always been interested in
the Anthropocene, my fascination with its artifacts grew when I accepted a
teaching position in the School of Art and Design at West Virginia University
and moved to “The Mountain State” — or what West Virginia’s former governor and
now senator, Joe Manchin, has lovingly called “The Extraction State.” Here, it
is obvious that not only have the surface and ecology of mountains changed
because of deforestation, but entire topographies have morphed in a geologic
instant as a product of large-scale mountaintop removal mining (MTR).

23.12.2012

“There is
nothing more alienating than having your pleasures disputed by someone with a
theory,” writes Lauren Berlant. Or, to quote from The Great Stone of Swarovski (Day 5), “After many hours of dead
air, we came within bluetooth range of the Tower of Olympus, wherein a 1/24th
scale hologram of was said to perform a synchronised chakra discharge from the
base of its spine. Using Crystallized Swarovski elements, this Pepper Ghost
from incredible TV could 24ct. gold plate your DS Lite, creating a truly unique
talisman investment solution. Sorry, the item above appears to be one of a
kind.” When we eat, as we must, we should at least eat as the Hesse story
imagines the wolves do, unelevated, amid the eaters, not neglecting to remember
that what we eat had its own best part that we have taken, perhaps irrevocably,
and that we, not innocent, will be taken in turn. All bodies can only pretend
to be upright; all are down here, constitutively interconnected and subject to
an end; all must be immanently somewhere; all belong to others in ways they can
hardly know; all subjects; all objects. All can only pretend to have a good
conscience. I’ve seen a photo of the wreath on Anne Gorrick’s door, made
entirely of de- and recapitated Barbies, like something out of Busby Berkeley
and Hans Bellmer, which she claims Maryrose Larkin sent her. Claims. This is
better than the good that dried up a while back and whispers. Who cares if this
dump goes? Don’t tell me you’re sentimental about it. Down with the
remnants of Empire! Down with its waystations and sub-station
brothels! Besides, it smells like shit-boiled cat glands. That is
probably your own vile reek. So what if I smell. As if to prove a point,
the threads on one of my coat’s chest buttons unstitched itself and caught in
small grey flame. Can a Spinozist ontology grapple with partiality? Or did
that prospect lose out the moment he saw the de Witt bros being torn a-part
like dogs are by other dogs but in truth like men by a mob? To call them
the greatest of all barbarians, via placard no less, the assumption being that
the killing, removing by blade of various parts (toes, fingers, noses? dicks?),
eating of other parts either raw at the scene of the butchering or elsewhere
after cooking (and seasoning?), and the keeping and frequent proud display of
Cornelis’ heart by the silversmith Hendril Verhoeff, are all things typical of
barbarians obvy means Baruch could not fathom a) the nature of barbarism
(which, being ontologically dark to the accusing social order, can’t be worst
or best, just more or less babbling), and b) how much worse it would be to have
been not De Witt but De Grotte, the famous Partial Man of Rotterdam dragged
around by a circus, on surprisingly legal grounds, along with “The Hottentot
Women” and “The Mute Mongoloid,” to be shown to adoring and spiteful crowds,
despite being a man not Partial in truth but just going-to-pieces, a victim of
a strange brass proto-guillotine before the device had come into named Gallic
prominence and hence was wielded with little skill, leaving him not unwhole but
just thinly – but technically still – associated with himself. Anne Boyer
writes then unwrites, “I am almost five years into this art project
how-to-be-happy-when-the-bear-has-your-arm.” But why are we like crows? Maybe
for no more reason that likening is what “like” does, and if the crows’
obscenities are in quotes, it’s because they are citing the people who habitually
put crows into words and put words into crows. “Must a crow be ragged? / If it
is not ragged. Then / what good is it?” Really, a cloud with three right
angles, and a bicep too? The Ice Age was yesterday. As if, were I able to be
any thing, I’d be a red plastic cup, the world. Four horses, minus their dragoons, bolted on Quai de Javel. They knocked over a coach and its driver, Fouché

[Note: Sources: Lauren Berlant, as quoted in blurb for her Desire / Love, at Punctum Books; JBR, but
see next; The Great Stone of Swarovski
(Day 5), at The Confraternity of
Neoflagellants; Karl Steel, “With the World, or Bound to Face the Sky: The
Postures of the Wolf-Child of Hesse”, in Animal,
Vegetable, Mineral: Ethics and Objects (ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen), at Punctum Books;
JBR;
John Ashbery, “Postlude and Prequel”, in Quick
Question; Evan Calder
Williams, “The Hinterland: A Travelogue, Part 3”, at The New Inquiry, 22 Dec 012; JBR, but see next; Anne Boyer, “I am almost five years
…”, at * (cancelled post); Barry
Schwabsky, and Matvei Yankelevich, “Crow Fictions”, as quoted in Schwabsky’s
“The Obscenities Are in Quotes”, at Hyperallergic, 22 Dec 012;
Mathias
Svalina, “Chapter Three: Down the Colorado”, at Anti- 2; Mathias Svalina,
“Red Plastic Cup”, at Web Del Sol; Félix Fénéon, Novels in Three Lines (tr. Luc Sante)]